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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified on Monday in the ongoing legal battle over the control of OpenAI. Nadella is the third high-profile figure to take the stand in three weeks, following testimony from Elon Musk and OpenAI President Greg Brockman. The lawsuit, initiated by Musk, alleges that the creators of ChatGPT abandoned their original non-profit mission in favor of self-enrichment, a claim that OpenAI's leadership denies.
A fourth billionaire, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, took the witness stand later Monday and said his stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm is worth about $7 billion. And a fifth billionaire, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, is scheduled to testify later in the week.
Altman and Brockman say that OpenAI is still controlled by a nonprofit foundation, despite having a for-profit arm with outside investors. They say Musk is now harassing them as competitors via the suit after he started his own AI company, xAI, now part of SpaceX. They also say Musk agreed with them about the need to start a for-profit arm but wanted to be the one to control it.
Microsoft is a co-defendant in the case through its partnership with OpenAI. Musk alleges that Microsoft was a bad influence on Altman and Brockman, encouraging them to violate their duty to OpenAI’s nonprofit mission by signing lucrative deals in which OpenAI obtained cloud computing services.
In response, Microsoft has said it wasn’t aware of any conditions that Musk, as a donor to OpenAI, might have placed on his charitable contributions. The company says it therefore didn’t intend to encourage Altman and Brockman to violate their duty.
On the witness stand, Nadella testified that OpenAI retained its independence even as the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership deepened over time.
